Is the noun ending a cue to grammatical gender processing? An ERP study on sentences in Italian

Gender-to-ending consistency has been shown to influence grammatical gender retrieval in isolated word presentation. Notwithstanding this wealth of evidence, the exact role and the time course of the processing of this distributional information remain unclear. This ERP study investigated if and when the brain detects gender-to-ending consistency in sentences containing Italian determiner-noun pairs. Determiners either agreed or disagreed in gender with nouns whose endings were reliable or misleading cues to gender (Transparent and Irregular nouns, respectively). Transparent nouns elicited an increased frontal negativity and a late posterior positivity compared to Irregular nouns (350-950ms), suggesting that the system is sensitive to gender-to-ending consistency from relatively early stages of processing. But gender agreement violations evoked a similar LAN-P600 pattern for both types of nouns. These findings provide evidence for an early detection of reliable gender-related endings during sentence reading.